1.THE PURPLE GOSPELS IN CONTEXT 2. INTRODUCTION: Phoenician civilization was based on the commerce of purple, a pigment obtained from the secretions of a mollusc, and their invention of the phonetic alphabet, uguaritic and semitic, written ‘boustrophedon’, as oxen plough fields back and forth, and in continuous scripts without spaces between words. Documentation of both of these comes from the fourteenth century before Christ.1 3. I. THE ALPHABET AND THE BIBLE In 2001 I organized an international conference on ‘The City and the Book’, on the Alphabet and the Bible, together with Jewish, Russian, English, Irish, Islandic, Spanish and Italian scholars. We discussed how the Alphabet and the Bible in Florence, came from outside of Europe yet are the base of our European civilization. It had begun with the Phoenician letters along the trade routes which became the Etruscan and runic letters that reached all the way to Iceland, where I have seen them on the keyboards of their computers.2 4. Before this phonetic maritime alphabet were the cuneiform (also Irish ogham) and hieroglpyhic images of the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile river valleys, as are still the pictograms of China and Japan. The Bible in Hebrew, christianized with the addition of the New Testament with the Gospel, instead adopted the variants of the alphabet that were developed in the territories conquered by Imperial Rome, the same letters seen today on the screen. At the beginning we had the Bible in Hebrew, its Torah, the five books of the Pentateuch, then in Greek, the Septuagint, but also the Gospels in Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Wulfila, Cyril and Methodias invented new alphabets, Wulfila for the Gothic language,3 Cyril and Methodias for the Slavic languages,4 Hildegard for herself. 5-6. I present a timeline of the Bible versions discussed in this paper. 640-609 B.C. King Josiah and Hulda 609-538 B.C. Babylonian Exile Torah/Penteteuch תּוֹ ָרה ,B.C. Ezra and Nehemiah 538 Samaritans, Abishua, Finea, Elisha, Aaron, Hebrew 200-50 B.C. Septuagint, Alexandria, Greek 150 B.C.-75 A.D. Qumram Scrolls. Hebrew 185-253 A.D. Origen, Hexapla, Six Hebrew and Greek Versions 283-371. Eusebius of Vercelli, Latin 311-383. Wulfila, Bible, Gothic 347-430. Jerome, Against Purple Gospels: 384, “VETERES LIBROS VEL IN MEMBRANE PURPUREIS AURO ARGENTOQUE DESCRIPTES, VEL UNCIALIBUS”; 385, Secretary to Pope Damasus I; 388, Holy Land with Paula and Eustochium IV C. CODEX VATICANUS, Greek IV C. CODEX SINAITICUS, Greek V C. ALEXANDRINUS, Greek V C. COTTON GENESIS, Greek V C. CODEX PALATINUS, Latin V C. CODEX VINDOBENSIS, Latin V C. CODEX VERONENSIS, Latin VI C. CODEX BRIXIANUS, Latin VI C. CODEX ARGENTEUS, Bible, Gothic VI C. VIENNA GENESI, Greek VI C. CODEX ROSSANENSIS, Gospel, Greek VI C. CODEX SINOPE, Gospel, Greek VI C. CODEX PETROPOLITANUS PURPUREUS, Gospel, Greek VI C. CODEX PURPUREUS BERATINUS, Greek 700-716. CODEX AMIATINUS, Bible, Latin 715-720 VANGELO DI LINDISFARNE, Latin, Old English VIII CODEX AUREUS, Latin, Old English IX C. LIBRO DI KELLS, Latin VII-X C. Masoretic Bibles, Tiberias, vocalized Hebrew 826-869 Cyril, 815-885 Methodias, Glagolitic Alphabet X C. CODEX ALEPPO, Hebrew X-XI C. Glagolitic and Cyrillic Bibles X-XII C. BEATUS APOCALISSE, Spain, Latin 1000 Conversion of Iceland, IV C. CODEX STJORN, Icelandic with a plea as had requested Father Leonard Boyle, O.P., of the Vatican Library, that when we study manuscripts, we consult both their texts and their codicology together: ‘‘. to me codicology in its full colours is an examination of the codex as a carrier of a text. If, as is the general tendency, one simply extracts a text from a codex, then the text is bereft of its setting, and the codex is ignored. If, on the contrary, one concentrates on the physical make-up of a codex, then the danger is that the codex will be treated in isolation from the text, as though it were any codex, and not just this specific codex carrying this specific text. Codicology, then, must include the text - not of course the text as text, but as physically carried by the codex whether this be the size of the columns, the spirals of the initials, the annotations, or indeed, the smudges of the readers …’5 7-8. The Samaritans of Nablus and Mount Gerizim still treasure their scrolls of the Torah, the Pentateuch of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.6 9. We do not have ancient examples of the Hebrew Bible, except for the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumram, rolls placed in clay jars in caves in the desert, because worn out Torah scrolls were given burial in cemeteries as if they were human bodies. The ALEPPO CODEX,7 held for ransom by the Christian Crusaders in 1099, then kept for six centuries in Aleppo, in 1843 was studied by Umberto Cassuto, is now held in Jerusalem. It is a medieval codex, written around 920, with the Masoretic vocalization added to it in Tiberias by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, like manuscripts now in St Petersburg, that were discovered in the Crimea. The masoretic school arose in part from the need to counter the rapid rise of Islam with its vocalized Arabic in the Koran through giving a similarly vocalized text of the Hebrew Bible to assist in the conversion of the Khazars of the Crimea. The ALEPPO CODEX was inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the Word Register in 2016. 10. III. THE FIRST CHRISTIAN BIBLES 185-253 Origen of Alexandria wrote the Hexapla in six columns of Hebrew and Greek, using asterisks, *, for material that was in the Hrew but not in the Greek texts, and vice versa with obeli, †, for material in the Greek texts, lacking in the Hebrew. Tortured under Emperor Decius in 250 he died soon after, his writings being condemned by Jerome and by Emperor Justinian. Some of his work was translated from Greek into Latin by Rufinus, the rest was lost. Bishop Eusebius of Vercelli (260-340) wrote an early Bible in Latin, the ‘Vetus Latina’, in the VERCELLI CODEX,8 on purple parchment. The Arian Bishop Wulfila (311-383), who came from Bulgaria, translated the Bible into the Gothic language. A copy of this would be made on purple parchment with letters of gold and silver in Ravenna in the VIth century under the Gothic Emperor Theodoric. From Ravenna Charlemagne may have brought it to Germany. Sweden, conquering Prague, took it as war loot. The CODEX ARGENTEUS9 is now in the Caroline Library of the University of Uppsala. Bulgaria, six centuries later, would become the locale for the use of Cyril and Methodius’ Bibles in the Glagolitic Alphabet. 11. Jerome (347-430, coming from what is now ex-Yugoslavia), criticized purple Gospels written in uncials of silver and gold: “Habeant veteres libros vel in membranis purpureis auro argentoque descriptos, vel uncialibus, ut vulgo aiunt, literis onera magis exarata quam codices, dum mihi meisque permittant pauperes habere scidulas et non tam pulchros codices quam emendatos.”10 He had studied Hebrew, and stayed in Cosntantinople and Rome, where he was secretary to Pope Damasus I (382-385), then a hermit in Egypt, finally from 388 living in the Holy Land with the noble rich Roman ladies, Paula and her daughter Eustochium, who funded and assisted in his project of translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, living in the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehemme. The ‘Vetus Latina’ had been translated only from the Greek. 12, 13, 14. Three Greek Bibles are of the greatest importance:: the VATICANUS of the IV C.,11 the SINAITICUS, of the IV C.,12 and the ALEXANDRINUS, of the V C.13 This last manuscript is ascribed to a woman, Tecla, in a note in arabic, but she was already dead in 325. The CODEX ALEXANDRINUS was given by the Patriarch of Alexandria by way of Constantinople (by then Istanbul under the Ottomans) to King James I, seeking protection from him, reaching England only when Charles I was on the throne, 1624-1627. Richard Bentley fled from the Ashburnham House fire in 1731 carrying this manuscript under his arm. 15. The COTTON GENESIS,14 in Greek, written in Alexandria in the V C., was given to King Henry VIII of England by two bishops from Philippi, who asserted it was a copy by Origen. Sir Robert Cotton acquired it for his library and from there it came into the British Museum in Ashburnham House. In the 1731 fire, it was reduced to shrunken fragments and cinders. Cassiodorus (485-585), Senator to the Gothic Arian Emperor Theodoric, in retirement at Vivarium in Calabria, created the CODEX GRANDIOR of Jerome’s Vulgate bible, which would then be acquired by two Anglo-Saxon monks in the VIII C., and copied as CODEX AMIATINUS at Wearmouth-Jarrow, in Northumbria. IV. THE PURPLE BIBLES 16. The CODEX PALATINUS, Vetus Latina, Gospel, V C., at Trento.15 17. The CODEX VERONENSIS, Vetus Latina, Gospel, V C., a Verona.16 18. The CODEX BRIXIANUS, Vetus Latina, Gospel, V C., at Brescia.17 19, 20, 21. The CODEX ARGENTEUS, Arian Bible in the Gothic language, Ravenna, VI C, under the Arian Gothic Emperor Theodoric, contemporary of both Boethius and Cassiodorus. This Bible created from the translation made by the Arian Bishop Wulfila in the IV C. The University of Uppsala’s Website gives a reading from this manuscript of the Lord’s Prayer in the Gothic language: ̰̰̈́̈́ ̰̿̽̓͂ ̸̿ ̹̽ ̷̹̼̹̰̼̽, ̴̷̹̰̹̽ͅ ̰̼͉̽ ̸̴̹̽. ̵̹̼̰̹ ̸̹̳̹̰̿̽̓̓̿̓ ̸̴̹̽̓. ̸̰̹̰̹͂ͅ ̹̻̰̾ͅ ̸̴̹̽̓, ̴̓ͅ ̹̽ ̷̹̼̹̰̽ ̷̰̾ ̰̰̽ ̸̰̹̰̹͂.